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A lifetime of civility

Posted on March 11, 2010July 14, 2011 by Staff

Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

There was mischief in the man – in his voice and eyes – the expression of a quenchless appreciation for the wonders of this world, absurdities and all. He was once called “a combination of Don Quixote and one of the best legal minds we’ll ever have.” He spoke up for the little guy and in the face of the Man, any place and any time he perceived injustice.

UNC Kenan Professor Emeritus Dan Pollitt died last Friday at the age of 88 after a brief period of declining health, characteristically gracious and kind through it all, reassuring his caretakers and warmly greeting the tide of friends and family who gathered at his side.

“He was just kind and gentle and warm to everyone,” said state Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, whom he married last year, “but that was his whole life.”

Make no mistake: Dan Pollitt was a force, a guy you wanted on your side. He was a winner, but always a congenial one. He carried it all off with élan.

“He was a soldier for what was right,” Kinnaird said, “and always respectful of the other side.”

He left the world a better place.

An ‘idea man’

Pollitt was born on July 6, 1921 in Washington, D.C. His father, Basil, a lawyer, helped implement the New Deal in Franklin Roosevelt’s Department of Justice. His parents divorced, and his mother, Mima, then earned a law degree and went to work for the Department of Justice, then the Department of the Interior, focusing on Indian rights.

Pollitt served in the Pacific with the 2nd Marine Division during World War II, suffering two slight wounds. He was in Nagasaki less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped.

In 1951, he married Jean Ann Rutledge, daughter of Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge. The Pollitts were married for 55 years and raised three children, Daniel, Phoebe and Susan. Jean died in 2006.

He became a lawyer, and then a teacher, and was there on the front lines of every social justice battle of his time. While working in the office of prominent civil-rights and civil-liberties lawyer Joseph L. Rauh, he helped defend Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller against Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1955, while teaching at the University of Arkansas, he was told to sign a disclaimer stating that he was not nor ever had been a member of the NAACP. He refused, quit and, at the urging of Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (Pollitt was counsel to the Sharecroppers Fund, on whose board Thomas sat), accepted the offer of a position at UNC, in the School of Law, where the foundation for a more tolerant environment had been laid by former university president Frank Porter Graham.

Here he became a mentor to, among countless others, Raleigh lawyer Wade Smith.

“I didn’t know any lawyers, and Dan simply took me under his wing,” Smith said in a 2000 interview. “I watched him, and I knew what a lawyer could be – what a difference a lawyer could make. His idealism seeped into me and helped me to be what I am…. He’s a wonderful, wonderful mixture of idealism and the law.”

And he made trouble. Pollitt helped integrate the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system, led a picket line to integrate a downtown theater and helped break the color line in the Atlantic Coast Conference as an active advocate for the recruitment of Charlie Scott onto Dean Smith’s men’s basketball team.

Along the way, he defended the free-speech rights of Ku Klux Klan leader James “Catfish” Cole and the North Carolina A&T students who sat down at a Greensboro Woolworth counter.

In a 1964 U.S. News & World Report article titled “What the Future Holds for America,” Pollitt was cited as one of Lyndon Johnson’s “Idea Men.” He urged investment in public schools.

Disagreeing without being disagreeable

Pollitt’s commitment to seeing to it that the values on which this country was built – his fealty to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and justice for all – were fully disseminated was reflected in his defense of laborers, from sharecroppers a half century ago to contract poultry workers in recent years, said Betty Bailey, former executive director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI) and a longtime friend.

“He wanted those rights applied to everybody,” Bailey said, “and he worked for that every day of his life.”

In a 1964 Harper’s article titled “Timid Lawyers and Neglected Clients,” he wrote, “Every case – whether on behalf of the unpopular defendant or not – is a leap into the dark. No one can foretell what new evidence may turn up, what vagaries of chance may occur. … There is always the hazard of being undone…. But if the lawyer stays close by the campfire and never ventures forth, the circle of safety and freedom will contract. It always does if nobody preserves it by venturing forth and taking risks.”

Pollitt ventured forth, and beyond. As he said in 2000, “I believe in free speech, I believe in nude dancing, I believe in the works.”

And though his political positions often put him at odds with his employers, his unfailing gentle good wit, and his gentility, disarmed would-be enemies.

“He would always stand up for the truth, but with that wonderful sense of humor,” Bailey said, a quality that also served him well in the classroom.

When RAFI named its new conference center for Pollitt, who served on its board for many years, Bailey was introduced to “legions” of former students who expressed their “ultimate respect, regardless of their political views.”

“He knew how to disagree without being disagreeable,” Bailey said.

The late Rev. W.W. Finlator, a lifetime champion of peace and justice, perhaps summed up Pollitt most succinctly: “Dan is attractive in most every way; he’s cut out of a different pattern.”

Pollitt continued to work and teach until the end. Last year, Gov. Beverly Perdue awarded him the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, one of the state’s highest honors.

“Constant skepticism is the hallmark of a democratic society,” he told The Citizen at the time. “That’s my motto.”

He also recalled a piece of advice he’d given his daughter Phoebe upon her arrest some years ago for an act of civil disobedience. He had written to her: “You know I carry in my wallet, for easy observation, a card with the words ‘Illegitimis non carborundum’: Don’t let the bastards [grind] you down.”

“He was so young in spirit, but so wise,” Bailey said. “So much knowledge, but so much humility.”

And kindness. “It was one of his highest values,” Kinnaird said on Monday. “Human kindness.”

3 thoughts on “A lifetime of civility”

  1. Steve Bernholz says:
    March 12, 2010 at 7:04 am

    By the time I took the oath required to become a lawyer 43 yrs ago, Dan Pollitt had shown me what protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States actually meant. I’m forever indebted to him for that teaching by example and much, much more!

  2. Rob Maitland says:
    March 12, 2010 at 8:21 am

    Dan Pollitt was and is the gold standard for all lawyers. He will be missed greatly. We need to recommit ourselves to the idea of “holding the center” while still pushing the envelope on social issues. Dan Pollitt was one of the few lawyers and people who could do that.

  3. Adam Stein says:
    March 15, 2010 at 4:19 pm

    When Jane and I were getting ready to move with our small children to NC so that I could join with Julius Chambers and James Ferguson in doing civil rights law, a labor lawyer in DC told me to be sure to look up Dan Pollitt. It turned out Dan was everything his admirers said of him. It also turned out that we had both grown up in DC, our fathers were New Dealers, and we shared close connections with two of our heroes, Joe Rauh, who was a neighbor of mine and friend of the family as I grew up, and Congressman Frank Thompson from New Jersey. It was not long before Dan was added to my short list of heroes – that is sadly so much shorter now with his passing. I feel so privileged to have known Dan and have had him as a friend.

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